1) This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect. We will perpetually have a progressive, liberal president, probably a Democrat, and we will probably see the House of Representatives go into Democrat hands and the Senate will stay in Democrat hands. – Michele Bachmann

2) The bill is worse than universal healthcare. Listen to me, it is worse than universal healthcare, and in the coming days as we get closer, we will explain why it’s worse than universal healthcare. It is the death knell of the country, there is no recovery from this one. None. No recovery. – Glenn Beck

3) If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”

Those answers: No amnesty, secure the border, enforce laws against businesses that hire illegals, and impose a moratorium on new immigration so wages can rise and immigrants enter the middle class and start voting as did the children and grandchildren of the immigrants of 1890-1920 by 1972.

So what are the Republicans doing?

Going back on their word, dishonoring their platform, and enraging their loyal supporters, who gave Mitt 90 percent of his votes, to pander to a segment of the electorate that gave Mitt less than 5 percent of his total votes.

4) The nation’s plutocrats are lined up with the Democratic Party in a short-term bid to get themselves cheap labor (subsidized by the rest of us), which will give the Democratic Party a permanent majority. If Rubio’s amnesty goes through, the Republican Party is finished. It will be the “Nancy Pelosi Democratic Party” versus the “Chuck Schumer Republican Party.” – Ann Coulter

5) Instead of cracking down on the Administration’s abuse of power, S. 744 places unprecedented new restrictions on interior enforcement – making the current situation much worse and much more hazardous. It is as if S. 744 were explicitly written to handcuff law enforcement officials – binding their hands while giving virtually unchecked authority to executive branch officials to prevent future removals, including removals of criminal aliens. – ICE Council president Chris Crane

6) It doesn’t stop illegal immigration. If anything it makes the problem worse by not securing the border and by incentivizing future illegal immigration. – Ted Cruz

7) Creating more than 30 million new immigrants, including 11 million former illegals, and supplanting their numbers with another 20-odd million guest workers is from a sociological and demographic point of view quite radical: 30 million is roughly a tenth of the current population of the United States. How we handle immigration is of fundamental importance to questions ranging from national security to economic growth to the character of our nation itself. That we cannot get a couple of small-time performance benchmarks written into the bill suggests that this issue is not being treated with the intelligence and the prudence it deserves. – The Editors at National Review

8) This is the administration that has refused to enforce the law… they have created new law out of nothing. They’ve violated the law in a number of ways. And our guys are counting on the administration to all of a sudden actually keep their word on something like securing the border when they’ve never done it before and they believe it’s in their political interest to continue not to secure the border even if there’s a deal? I mean that’s crazy to think they’re going to start securing the border and until we secure the border everything else is completely meaningless. – Louie Gohmert

9) Should this be grounds to primary challenge every Republican who voted for this bill, and I mean every single one? I don’t care if they just got re-elected. Next time they’re up for re-election. Ann Coulter’s right. This is a single issue – this is a single-issue primary challenge. You know why? Because this is it. As Bill Kristol said on this show, as he said on this show, once you give this pathway to citizenship all these benefits, all this discretion to [Janet] Napolitano, it’s over. It’s too late to complain about it. It’s over. – Laura Ingraham

10) The federal judge in Crane v. Napolitano has ruled that the ICE agents are likely to prevail in their argument that the Obama administration is ordering them to violate federal law. Think about that: This administration is ordering career law enforcement personnel to break the law. Now, the administration is pushing for an amnesty bill that contains almost nothing to improve immigration enforcement. All that the American citizens will get in return for the amnesty is the promise from the Obama administration that they will try harder to enforce the law. The administration has already shattered that promise, doing exactly the opposite. This is a stark warning to Congress. I sincerely hope that they hear it. – Kris Kobach

11) Almost every requirement in this bill can be waived by Janet Napolitano: for instance, the time limits on when people can be legalized, the requirements on criminal activity or even the enforcement triggers. Those basically don’t mean anything if any of them is held up in court, still. …The litigation over the 1986 bill didn’t end until just a few years ago. The ACLU has been quite clear that it intends to sue to stop mandatory e-verify and probably sue to stop a bunch of other things. If, for instance, mandatory use of electronic verification is still in the courts 10 years after the bill passes, it’s entirely possible the Secretary of Homeland Security can just give everybody Green Cards on her own – and there are hundreds of other examples of that kind of discretion. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that this 1,000 page bill after all of the amendments could be boiled down to, “We trust you, Obama; just do the right thing.” – Mark Krikorian

12) The ‘Gang of Eight’ bill is not immigration reform. It is big government dysfunction. It is an immigration Obamacare. All advocates of true immigration reform – on the left and the right – should oppose it. – Mike Lee

13) Okay. So what does that mean, the republic is at stake? This is the ball game. I remember people saying that about Obamacare. Now they’re saying it about immigration reform. And they’re both right. In the case of immigration reform, it effectively wipes out the Republican Party. – Rush Limbaugh

14) Will they listen? Suicidal Republicans have supported illegal alien amnesties dating back to the Reagan era. They have paid a steep, lasting price. As bankrupt, multiculti-wracked California goes, so goes the nation. The progs’ plan has always been to exploit the massive population of illegal aliens to redraw the political map and secure a permanent ruling majority.

Now, in the wake of nonstop D.C. corruption eruptions, SchMcGRubio and Company want us to trust them with a thousand new pages of phony triggers, left-wing slush-fund spending and make-believe assimilation gestures. Trust them? Hell, no. There’s only one course for citizens who believe in upholding the Constitution and protecting the American dream: Stop them. – Michelle Malkin

15) On every major front, this legislation fails to deliver on its core promises. It delivers only for the special interest groups who helped write it. Should it pass, it would represent the ultimate triumph of the Washington elite over the everyday citizen to whom Congress properly owes its loyalty. – Jeff Sessions

Excerpt – Every time I go on his show, my radio pal Hugh Hewitt asks me why congressional Republicans aren’t doing more to insist that the GOP suicide note known as “the immigration deal” include a requirement for a border fence. I don’t like to tell Hugh that, if they ever get around to building the fence, it won’t be to keep the foreigners out but to keep you guys in.

I jest, but only very slightly and only because the government doesn’t build much of anything these days – except for that vast complex five times the size of the Capitol the NSA is throwing up in Utah to house everybody’s data on everything everyone’s ever done with anyone ever.

Excerpt – One might expect Keith Alexander to advocate on behalf of the two programs at the center of our national debate about terrorism and surveillance. He is, after all, the head of the National Security Agency, which runs them. “It’s dozens of terrorist events that these have helped prevent—both here and abroad-in disrupting or contributing to the disruption of terrorist attacks,” Alexander testified last week.

And it’s not entirely surprising that the four leading members of Congress on intelligence matters would argue on behalf of these programs, known as “215” and “702,” for the sections of the laws that authorize them.

Excerpt – One of the most common arguments for allowing more immigration is that there is a “need” for foreign workers to do “jobs that Americans won’t do,” especially in agriculture.

One of my most vivid memories of the late Armen Alchian, an internationally renowned economist at UCLA, involved a lunch at which one of the younger members of the economics department got up to go get some more coffee. Being a considerate sort, the young man asked, “Does anyone else need more coffee?”

“Need?” Alchian said loudly, in a cutting tone that clearly conveyed his dismay and disgust at hearing an economist using such a word.

Excerpt – We all know now what the vengeful Obama IRS has been doing to conservative nonprofits the past four years: strangling them in the crib. But do you know how much pampering and largesse far-left welfare-state charities have received while limited-government groups suffered? You don’t know the half of it.

Before President Obama took office, I warned that Democrats planned to steer untold amounts of taxpayer dollars to his shady community-organizing pals. The Dems’ 2008 party platform proposed the creation of a “Social Investment Fund Network” to subsidize “social entrepreneurs and leading nonprofit organizations (that) are assisting schools, lifting families out of poverty, filling health care gaps and inspiring others to lead change in their own communities.”

Excerpt – Grutter v. Bollinger was the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld the University of Michigan Law School’s racial admissions policy. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said the U.S. Constitution “does not prohibit the Law School’s narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body.” But what are the educational benefits of a diverse student body?

Intellectuals argue that diversity is necessary for academic excellence, but what’s the evidence? For example, Japan is a nation bereft of diversity in any activity. Close to 99 percent of its population is of one race. Whose students do you think have higher academic achievement – theirs or ours?

In a much-discussed essay for Salon, Michael Lind asks: “If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?”

Such is the philosophical poverty of liberalism today that this stands as a profound question.

Definitions vary, but broadly speaking, libertarianism is the idea that people should be as free as possible from state coercion so long as they don’t harm anyone.

REGION 10Division A
Oregon State
Nevada
Arizona State
Stanford
New Mexico State
UNLVDivision B
USC
Arizona
Fresno State
California
Washington State
HawaiiDivision C
Oregon
UCLA
New Mexico
San Diego State
Washington

Note: during the regular season, each team will play 3 games in their division, 3 games in their region but outside their division, and 6 games in other regions.

——————————————————————————————————–

PLAYOFFS CONFIGURATION

First Round
The 24 divison winners will play 12 games in 6 days (over 2 consecutive weeks). Each matchup will be based on win/loss records and schedule strenghts so that No. 1 plays No. 2, No. 3 plays No. 4, No. 5 plays No. 6, etc.

Second Round
The 12 remaining teams will play 6 games over 3 consecutive days. Each matchup will be determined by first round performances based on winning points margins – and in cases of ties in that regard – strength of opponents based on regular season rankings.

Third Round
The 6 remaining teams will play 3 games over 3 consecutive days. Each matchup will be determined by combined first and second round performances based on winning points margins – and in cases of ties in that regard – total net yardage.

No. 1 plays No. 3, No, 2 plays No. 5 and No. 4 plays No.6.

Note: these 3 games will called the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl and the Cotton Bowl respectively.

Fourth Round
The 3 remaining teams will be ranked by combined first, second and third round performances based on winning points margins – and in cases of ties in that regard – total net yardage.

No. 1 will have a week off while No. 2 plays No. 3 to determine who meets No. 1 in the national championship game.

Note: this game will be called the Rose Bowl and will be played on New Year’s Day.

National Championship
No. 1 pays No. 2.

Note: this game will be called the Camp Bowl – named for Walter C. Camp, the father of American football..

US Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) announced this week that he was switching political parties. Initially he said that he was doing so because he didn’t want to be “judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate,” the same electorate he courted in his last election. But later, after he realized his statement depicted him as an ungrateful political opportunist, he said his decision was based on the idea that the Republican Party – which has moved more to the center in recent years – has “moved too far to the Right.” The truth is that Specter is a political opportunist who has literally thrown his constituency under the bus just to save his political career. In the political sense, he is a traitor.

The element of surprise surrounding this announcement comes in that he chose a time when the Republican Party can least afford to lose even one from their ranks. With anti-American, neo-Marxist Al Franken likely to be seated as the junior senator from Minnesota and the two Independent senators, Joseph Lieberman (CT) and Bernie Sanders (VT), voting with Democrats on social issues, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have their “last man needed” to advance social programs that will redefine the authority of the American government and literally cripple the economy. Arlen Specter has handed Barack Obama the total of his agenda for at least the next two years and there isn’t a damn thing the Republicans can do about it.

In Specter’s formal announcement – in other words, after Specter’s political spin doctors crafted an excuse for his narcissistic, self-serving party switch – he said:

“Since my election in 1980…the Republican Party has moved far to the right…I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans.”

Really? The current Republican Party is now more to the right than during the Reagan Era? The spendthrift Republican Party of the 2000-2004 Era is more to the right of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Party of the Conservative Revolution and Contract with America? Is anyone buying this line of garbage?

The sad, despicable truth of the matter is that Specter switched parties because he was going to have his butt handed to him on a platter in the Pennsylvania Republican Primary Election, courtesy of Pat Toomey, former president of the Club for Growth, an organization that promotes a low-tax and limited-government agenda. Specter’s political treason had nothing to do with ideology, but has everything to do with political longevity.

Not too long ago, former DNC Chairman and current Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, let it be known that Democrats had been courting Specter to switch parties. Rendell is even quoted as saying that he, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Vice President Joe Biden had all tried to persuade Specter into turning his back on the Republican Party. At the time, Specter responded that “he didn’t want to see Republican moderates vanish from the face of the Earth.” With Specter’s announcement, it would be fair to assume this sentiment was based in opportunism and advanced as pure rhetoric.

Republicans were already well aware that he was less a Republican and more a Democrat. He voted for the stimulus package, which was vehemently opposed by all but three “Republicans,” and over the years Specter amassed a voting record that found him voting with the opposition party almost 50% of the time. And he begged to ride President Bush’s coattails in 2004 for the fact that he was so disliked by core Republican voters in Pennsylvania. But Republicans were in no position to be subjected to defection after November of 2008. With an almost super-majority in the House and now a virtual filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, nothing stands between Barack Obama and the realization of some of the most fiscally irresponsible and constitutionally destructive legislative measures ever to be imposed on our nation.

Like it or not, the United States of America is now a one-party government run by the radical Left. And while, in the end, the blame for this predicament rests with those who were distracted by the “bright shiny thing”; who naively voted for the hollow rhetoric of “hope” and “change,” we could have had at least a fighting chance through the use of the filibuster to maintain the liberties and freedoms, the rights bequeathed to us to safeguard, had the traitor Specter honored the Pennsylvania electorate’s ballot determination. With his political treason – and that is exactly what it is when you consider the fact that Pennsylvania voted in a Republican senator in Specter – he has usurped the authority of the people and the authority of the ballot box to further his political career, electorate be damned.

One has to wonder how many political “pieces of silver” the traitor Specter received for selling out his constituency for a political party.

Like this:

Like many conservatives, traditionalists and Republicans who didn’t want to ape the caustic rhetoric of the neo-Marxist Progressive-Left used during the entirety of the Bush Administration, I promised myself to refrain from immediately assuming that Barack Obama was going to bring with him to the White House the backroom politics of Chicago’s Democrat Machine. I employed the Reagan doctrine of “trust but verify.” Well, the verdict is in and the political tactics and policies that Barack Obama has brought to the Executive Branch are not only of the old school “Chicago Way,” they are literally neo-Marxist and naïve.

Let me explain the “Chicago Way.”

Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, have been under Democrat control for as long as I have been alive and before. Most of us grew up watching newsmen like Fahey Flynn, listening to radio journalists like Wally Phillips and reading print journalists like Mike Royko, we were provided a daily examination of the Richard J. Daley Administration; we were afforded an advanced degree in Chicago-style political politics. It is the politics of smoky backrooms and “old boy networks,” patronage, pay-to-play contracting, and governmental protection and appointment of campaign contributors and their families. In Chicago, if it’s about power or money for the elected class and/or the enrichment and advancement of their political allies it most likely becomes governmental policy and viewed as necessary for “saving grace” of society.

From Mr. Obama’s campaign staff and tactics to his initial executive actions, from his White House cabinet appointments to the administration’s protection of AIG, each and every action has been textbook Chicago politics, and why not. Barack Obama cut his teeth and “rolled his bones” within the caldron of Chicago’s political arena.

In a previous article titled, This Is What a Vote for Obama Gets You, I tried to convey, if even in the most rudimentary of ways, what we could expect if Barack Obama were to be elected President of the United States. Well, that has come to pass and we are now faced with the prospect of having to – of needing to – abandon our apathy for governmental oversight while becoming learned in political and governmental current events.

Two disturbing examples of why we have to return to the frontlines of governmental and political oversight present in the issues of the AIG bailout and newly passed legislation to recoup bailout monies used to satisfy retention incentive bonuses set in place before any bailout monies were issued.

The feigned outrage by some of the very people who manufactured the subprime mortgage crisis (specifically US Rep. Barney Frank and US Sen. Chris Dodd) over the $165 million dollars in contractually obligated retention bonuses is, in fact, a traditional Chicago political tactic to redirect attention and deflect.

Consider this question: Which would cause you to be more outraged, $165 million in retention bonuses paid to Americans so that they would stay beyond their contracts to finish the projects they were hired to do, or billions of dollars being funneled, not only to corporations that have already benefited from the taxpayer bailout, but to foreign banks?

While the Washingtonian elected class – especially the Democrats – are howling about $165 million dollars in retention bonuses, the same corporation responsible for satisfying these contractual obligations, AIG, has paid out billions of dollars – billions – to corporations like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, whom have already received taxpayer bailout monies. Additionally, because AIG is an international corporation, they have issued billions of dollars – billions – to foreign financial institutions: $13 billion to British banks, $17 billion to German banks, $19 billion for French banks and $5 billion to the Swiss. In all $62 billion in taxpayer monies have been sent to foreign financial institutions. Glenn Beck did a fabulous job of breaking down the math.

So, while the Obama Administration and the neo-Marxists in Congress (specifically US Rep. Barney Frank and US Sen. Chris Dodd) focus the media’s attention – and public outrage – on $165 million in contractually mandated retention bonuses that are, admittedly, repugnant to accept at this economically troublesome time (not to mention unpatriotic) there is little attention being paid to corporate double-dipping and the outsourcing of American taxpayer dollars to private foreign financial institutions.

To add insult to outrage, the US House of Representatives – led by one of the most inept and ideologically motivated Speakers in the history of the United States, Nancy Pelosi – has passed legislation, by a 328 to 93 margin, that would levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses paid to employees with family incomes above $250,000 at companies that have received at least $5 billion in government bailout money.

While this legislative move sounds good at first reading and certainly panders to the public’s outrage, it flies in the face of contract law and threatens the Capitalist system of the West to its core. It spotlights the incredible danger of ruling by emotion; of hastily ramming legislation through the congressional process. It also spotlights the reason why the Founders and Framers crafted a system by which legislation was debated first in committee and then on the floors of the House and the Senate. Congress, under the agenda-driven stewardship of Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have usurped that process to craft legislation since the beginning of the 111th Congress, instead crafting legislation behind closed doors employing only their crony fellowship. Their legislation has enacted laws that void contracts and outsource taxpayer money to foreign financial institutions.

It would all make for an interesting movie script if we weren’t talking about the future of our country and the state of nation we want to bestow upon our children and our children’s children.

This is classic Chicago politics. When you are doing something detrimental to your political well-being, something that would, without question, motivate the electorate to remove you from office, when you are enacting policy that you know the public would overwhelmingly oppose; distract, deflect and re-direct. Pander to the electorate’s sitcom attention span by tantalizing them with a “bright, shiny thing.” It works every time in Chicago, that’s why Illinois is cobalt blue.

So, pay no attention to the ongoing raid of the US Treasury by the neo-Marxists hell-bent on making the American people conform to the one-world order. I mean really, global warming is afoot!

Like this:

The definition of a citizen is one who is ruled and can rule in turn. We must have the capacity for both under the law. All citizens must be able to take the following oath of office:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”

Sadly, in today’s day and age, those elected to our legislature do not have to understand the law to represent their electors. Consequently, this Congress has proven to be the most constitutionally illiterate group of people ever elected to office.

To begin, one of the most difficult things to do is to enact a bill into law. The system of checks and balances was designed by the Founders and Framers to slow things down. They wanted creating and debating legislation to be a cumbersome process. Hamilton appealed to the people of New York,

“The legislature will not be infallible; …the love of power may sometimes betray it into a disposition to encroach upon the rights of other members of the government; that a spirit of faction may sometimes pervert its deliberations; that impressions of the moment may sometimes hurry it into measures which itself, on maturer reflexion, would condemn. The primary inducement to conferring the [veto] power in question upon the Executive is, to enable him to defend himself; the secondary one is to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws, through haste, inadvertence, or design. The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest. It is far less probable, that culpable views of any kind should infect all the parts of the government at the same moment and in relation to the same object, than that they should by turns govern and mislead every one of them.

“It may perhaps be said that the power of preventing bad laws includes that of preventing good ones; and may be used to the one purpose as well as to the other. But this objection will have little weight with those who can properly estimate the mischiefs of that inconstancy and mutability in the laws, which form the greatest blemish in the character and genius of our governments. They will consider every institution calculated to restrain the excess of law-making, and to keep things in the same state in which they happen to be at any given period, as much more likely to do good than harm; because it is favorable to greater stability in the system of legislation. The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws, will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones.” – Federalist Paper #73

Yet, despite such an admonition -which holds as true today as it did when the U.S. Constitution was written- President Obama advised our country that if we do not act immediately to pass the stimulus bill, “Our nation will sink deeper into a crisis, that, at some point, we may not be able to reverse.” Rep Nancy Pelosi, a progressive leftist from CA, is quoted on Jan 8, 2009 as saying, “We must have a bill signed into law by the middle of February. Our economy requires it. The American people need it desperately.”

The $787 billion Stimulus Bill, passed quickly, before members of Congress had time to even read the entire text of the legislation, allowed some of the beneficiaries to hand out bonuses to their top executives. In reaction to the fury of the constituents, Congress set about enacting more hastily drawn up legislation to punish the beneficiaries of such bonuses.

“The Senate plans to vote next week on steep levies on employee bonuses after the House overwhelmingly approved a 90 percent tax on bonuses at American International Group Inc. and other companies receiving bailout funds.” – Bloomberg.com

Herein lays the problem. Congress, in acting with haste, is passing poorly written law without thinking through the consequences of their actions. In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek writes that if individuals know the law, they can base their actions upon established rules and that true law provides the general rules. Legislative enactments which do not satisfy these criteria are objectionable. The law must be general, known and certain, and apply equally to all. A necessary condition for the law to be known and certain is a prohibition on ex post facto laws. The Cato Journal The U.S. Constitution forbids Congress from passing an ex post facto law, i.e. a law passed after the occurrence of an event or action which retrospectively changes the legal consequences of the event or action.

Worse, this particular law singles out a specific group of people. A legislative act (Bill of Pains and Penalties) that singles out one or more persons and imposes punishment on them without benefit of trial was regarded as “odious” by the framers of the Constitution. It was the role of a court, judging an individual case, to impose punishment.

Now, the House, the Senate and the Treasury Department are blaming each other for allowing this loophole. As “We the People” witness the unfolding saga of the bonuses, stimulus money is being put to use in programs long championed by the liberal elements of Congress and which have nothing to do with directly stimulating the economy. Congress is confiscating and redistributing our hard earned money as we watch stunned and amazed at what has transpired in President Obama’s first 59 days of office. It is our civic responsibility to put an end to this nonsense. We have 592 days until the 2010 midterm elections.

When will you add your elected officials’ telephone numbers to your speed dial list?